For the ones who are awakening and remembering

When the life you worked for stops motivating you

When you start noticing success doesn’t bring you satisfaction

A short while ago, on a light rainy day, I was clutching my umbrella while crossing Kim Tian road, a road I’ve crossed a million times before since this was the neighborhood I grew up in.

I was to catch up with J, a friend whose friendship to me began before i began to change my life. We stayed lightly connected through the last 6 years, but he made it known to me that my reflections on social media left imprints on him. He related to the part of my life where I found my satisfaction after seemingly achieving everything it requires to feel “successful” in a society like Singapore.

I walk through the old houses of Tiong bahru, always remembering how I belong to 3 generations of women who have grown up in Tiong bahru. My grandmother born in 1920s who was sold as a baby and her mother whom we have little knowledge of. My mother who grew up as an entrepreneur for a mother and a father who’s a stocks delivery driver, except his car was a bicycle.

Before long, I arrive at our meeting place, and I approach my friend from the back. He looks largely the same until he turned around, and I saw that his face was brightly lit. I hadn’t seen him for at least 7 years and he looked as if he didn’t age a single day. In fact, he seemed to glow with more vitality.

I was curious to know what’d caused this change in his aura. At least from what I remember of it.

Whereas in the past, our past selves might have met for a drink at a bar somewhere along Amoy street, J and I are now ordering teh and kaya toast at 2pm in the afternoon. Some things have indeed changed.

After I shared what happened with me in the last 6 years, giving him a wide perspective of why certain things had to happen for me to learn, adapt and evolve, he too started to share how the last 6 years had taught him certain things.

He shared that life started to feel stagnent after he achieved a big goal of his. He’d been using it as a motivation for life and had much momentum creating a successful career in the corporate world. But the industry and environment he was once so passionate about and still misses has changed. Singapore has changed its perspectives about nightlife and the party industry. People are finding activities and hobbies that feel more aligned with how they feel within.

He decided that enough was enough. J wants to find more joy and balance in his life. He is ready to entertain possibilities of moving to a new country, settling there and starting a smalll sustainable business.

He shared with me his future plans, how they all surround a positive outlook on growth, personal development, love and happiness. He was ready to stop waiting for life to bring him happiness. He was about to embark on a trip of discovery where no clear paths lay ahead. He was about to carve his own path instead of follow “stability”. And I celebrated that with him, with a toast between his kopi and my teh.

Meeting J brought me back to my state of being, back in 2018, when that significant trip to Sri Lanka triggered the next 7 years of cycles and evolution.

“When you start noticing success doesn’t bring you satisfaction, you start questioning what success means and what instead can bring you fulfillment?”

In 2018: I decided to leave my sales career because I was getting depressed and unmotivated, and my health was declining

In 2019, While trying to survive this awareness that I was in a fragmented state, my marriage fell apart after we tried for many months to gain understanding of each other.

In 2020 before I turned 28: I started travelling and started to feel alot of my stuck emotions. I started to understand the reason behind my defensiveness, and to hold myself in safety so I wouldn’t deny myself of feeling my feelings

In 2021, After turning 29, I began a relationship that was challenging all my beliefs of marriage, partnership. I began working in a new industry, one that gave me a key to understanding freedom. Freedom at first looked like being able to work from anywhere.

At 30 In 2022, I continued enjoying this “so-called” freedom when I realized I still had alot of “shadows” to face and I can’t just bypass this darkness within me. In 2022, I was brought through the shadows and it was an intense period of my life.

In 2023, when I was 31, I started to notice I was in a transition stage. I felt like a caterpillar in metamorphosis stage. This year marked the beginning of a phase I call “shedding”. When the caterpillar goes through an intense change of states, it has to “reset”, and literally transform itself into a being with wings that could fly. This was the year I lost my “bestfriend”, broke up with my partner for a few months, and continued shedding everything that didn’t belong to the next stage of evolution.

A caterpillar is not a butterfly, but they’re two states of the same origin. Neither one better than the other, just different fractals of the process bound by time.

In early 2024, I moved back to Singapore and started living more like the butterfly I was becoming. The shift wasn’t easy. The metamorphosis stage was accelerating with every pain I overcame, every intense emotion I rode through. I was constantly reminded to remember the wisdom “this too shall pass”.

In 2025, I began to feel ready to spread my new formed wings, and I began seeking out places I could dry my wings and take them out on early flying drills. At first I flew only a meter, then started covering hundreds of metres and eventually kilometres.

In 2026, I am ready to transform at all times, in all skins I can wear. I am ready to use the creative passion within me, to repeat and integrate cycles as they happen.

This is the year of 11:11:11

May Oneness touch us all.